


The Millennium Gift

by Vaysh



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Conditioning, Gen, Human Experimentation, Human Trafficking, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Memory Loss, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-01-25
Packaged: 2018-05-16 02:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5810029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaysh/pseuds/Vaysh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With the collapse of the Red Room/KGB, the Winter Soldier is sold to Shield aka Hydra. Alexander Pierce is a much more dangerous man than his previous handlers. This is their first meeting in the year 2000.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Millennium Gift

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Chantefable for beta-reading. I expanded the story after her beta. All mistakes are mine. :)

The Winter Soldier had been some kind of Millennium gift to S.H.I.E.L.D. The gift came with a price tag of 45 million dollars. It was a bargain for a world-class assassin; you wouldn't get a world-class soccer player for that price. Clearly, the new Russia could no longer be bothered with a relic from the fifties. A dangerous relic, too, that was on the secret hit-list of every nation on earth (with the exception, possibly, of Iceland and Mauritius). A relic that was human despite the metal arm and cryofreeze, recognizably human. A freaky reminder that much of post-WWII science rested on experiments executed on humans during the war. 

It was not just Hitler who had done the experimenting, Alexander Pierce thought, as he walked around the man strapped with heavy metal clasps to the chair. _Chair_ was a euphemism. It was a device to burn away memory-related parts of the brain with electricity. The Russians were cruel bastards, always had been. The man was muscled, chest and thighs like a body-builder. His skin was pale, lasered hair-free, dry and rough at the elbows. His hair was dull and tangled, it needed to be cut. Pierce let his gaze move upward. The face was young underneath the stubble that had grown in the hours since they had taken him out of the freezing chamber. Thirty at the most, probably younger, from the looks of it. The file – a paper file, no digital record available – dated the birth of the Winter Soldier back to an unbelievable 1917.

Amnesty International would have a field day if it ever leaked that James Buchanan Barnes, an American POW for fifty-five years, was held captive in the nation's capital. The Winter Soldier's true identity was one of the Cold War Era's best kept secrets. Not even the man himself, sitting in front of Pierce, knew that Barnes had once been his name.

Pierce lowered his body to be eye to eye with the man. He could feel his knees protest, negligible pain but still a reminder that he was not getting younger.

The soldier stared at him from startling blue eyes. Or rather, he stared at a point just above Pierce's left shoulder. Well trained. But staring so intensely that Pierce had to suppress the urge to turn around. There was nobody in the vault, he had made sure of it. The guards, a hand-picked team of agents who had joined Hydra at the same time he had, were standing behind the bars, guns aimed at the soldier. Pierce had sent the technicians and doctors, all Russians, out of the basement. They needed to be replaced as soon as possible, with people he could trust.

Pierce moved to the right side of the chair, blue eyes following him. The soldier hadn't moved when the technicians had strapped him to the chair. He'd been docile since they jumpstarted his heart whose beat had been slowed to barely perceptible while frozen. Adrenalin, the file said. There was a regular heart-beat now. The soldier had been awake for fourteen hours, he'd been cleaned, shot with vitamins and drugs, fed, undergone a battery of tests. Pierce had been assured by the Russians that the soldier was mission-ready twelve hours out of cryofreeze.

The metal prosthetic looked like something out of a science-fiction movie. Pierce had studied the X-rays that showed how the arm's wiring was grafted unto the nervous system of the living man, how the metal was fused with his skeleton. The soldier's spine, the right clavicle, his sternum and his knees had been enforced with alloys. Pierce had read the medical files, pages and pages on procedures, the last not four years ago. He still hadn't been prepared for it. Where skin and arm met, metal platelets looked as if they had grown into the body; they disappeared below pink skin that didn't even look like scar tissue, the way it naturally aligned itself with the metal. From the seam, though, red scars reached into the soldier's chest, a twisted mess of ragged flesh. The contrast to the technical perfection of the arm could not be more pronounced. The silver plates fitted against each other smoothly. Pierce had seen many videos of the soldier in action, a fine-tuned display of inhuman speed and flexibility. And power. The arm was controlled by the man's brain, neural commands translated into electrical impulses. Its fine motor skills were comparable to those of a juggler. The arm registered pressure, temperature, humidity but was immune to pain. It was, Pierce grudgingly admitted, a superior technical achievement. He doubted Stark Industries owned any kind of man-machine interface comparable to this.

He looked up to the man's face, and for a moment their eyes met. The soldier had watched him, had observed the scrutiny Pierce gave to his bionic arm. Now he shifted his gaze, not fast, he was not flinching away. But he moved his gaze back to the point above Pierce's left shoulder and kept it steady. His face was unreadable.

All right, then. Pierce motioned for Drewer to enter the vault. Drewer was an experienced soldier. They went all the way back to Bogota, had worked together for years. Pierce knew nothing of Drewer but his service record and what he'd observed of him in action. He didn't know his first name – Paul? Rick? – but he trusted him completely. 

"Take off the clasps," he ordered. "I want him out of this chair."

A suppressed gasp came from the bars. Pierce could practically feel the team go into high alert, guns grabbed tighter, bodies going into battle stance. They'd all been raised with horror stories of the ghost. 

Drewer didn't blink an eye. He stepped towards the computer beside the chair, tapped a few keys, and the clasps snapped open.

The soldier did not move, not even a deeper intake of breath or a twitching of the fingers, metal or flesh. Very well trained. This kind of training, Pierce thought, was something the Russians were really good at, too.

"I am your new handler," he said, looking the soldier directly into the face. "My name is Pierce. You are now working for S.H.I.E.L.D."

No reaction. The man had been in cryofreeze for seven months. That much the doctors had told Pierce but they had known little about his missions. There was nothing in the file about the period between July 1991 and February 1996, not a single page. Pierce had his personal assistant search for unsolved assassinations fitting the Winter Soldier's profile but nothing had come up. His last recorded mission had been in September 1999, clearly related to the Moscow apartment bombings but no records of what part exactly the Winter Soldier had played. Pierce had a feeling the man had been taken in and out of cryofreeze on a whim, whenever some new intelligence big-shot had wished to observe the legendary Winter Soldier awake. 

"Get up," he ordered.

The soldier sat up in a fluid motion, sliding his arms from the metal clasps. He stood and stepped to the side, close but out of Pierce's reach. Or rather, Pierce was out of his reach. He was tall, taller than Pierce had judged from his awkward half-lying backward position in the chair. Pierce himself was a tall man but the soldier easily had an inch on him. He wore only a pair of old-fashioned white briefs. His naked body looked oddly at home against the backdrop of the polished brass of the safety deposit boxes. _The asset_ , the team had started calling the soldier, and Pierce secretly approved even when he would never use that name.

"The Major is your CO." Pierce motioned towards Drewer who gave a small nod. "He will lead you to the place where you sleep and give you clothes. He's in charge of your gear and weapons. Understood?"

"Yes, Sir." The clipped reply came at once, voice hoarse with a noticeable Russian accent. Pierce had no plans for undercover missions, or they would have to work on that. But likely, the longer the soldier was surrounded by English-speaking guards, the sooner he'd fall back in his native tongue. Another reason why the Russians needed to go.

"Any questions you have, they're to be directed to me." Pierce looked at the soldier, prompting him by tone of voice to reply. He had been promised that the man was not a brain-dead automaton who only reacted to direct orders. He'd been promised a perfect assassin who was capable of all human interaction required for a mission.

The soldier gave a quick nod. "Understood, Sir." He looked around, even moved a step backwards to take in the vault. He was assessing his surroundings, Pierce realized, to figure out whether he had questions to ask or not. The soldier's gaze lingered on the barred gates and the assault team behind it. Pierce was certain he understood the outdated elevator was the only way out.

"Well," he asked slowly, "do you have any questions?"

The blue eyes snapped back to him. The soldier stood unmoving for a few seconds, clearly processing what he'd been told and what he'd just seen. "I..." He motioned towards his body with the metal arm. "You'll brief me on my mission once I'm clothed." 

Not a question but a statement. Pierce quirked his lips. The Russian accent was still thick in the soldier's words but the intonation was clearly American.

"I have only two questions, Sir," the soldier continued. "What year is it? And where is this place?" He moved his metal arm again, a sweeping gesture to encompass the whole of the vault.

"We're in Washington, D.C.."

The soldier stood still as if the city meant nothing to him. Pierce felt compelled to add, "The capital of the United States of America."

The explanation earned him the first real emotion from the soldier, a flicker of exasperation in his eyes. Then Pierce understood.

"We're in an abandoned bank building. In the security vaults. Easily guarded." He didn't need to say that a place easily guarded was also a good place to keep someone as dangerous as the Winter Soldier locked inside.

The soldier nodded casually as if he'd figured that much. The expression on his face was still expectant, and yes, the year.

"It's 2000. May 7."

The man actually gasped. His flesh hand twitched. For a startled moment Pierce thought the innocuous date had dislodged some of the conditioning. On his right he felt more than saw Drewer raise his gun.

"Two thousand...?" The man's voice broke, his eyes went wide and for a full second he stared directly at Pierce before forcing his gaze to the left again. 

Pierce had to remind himself that the soldier's short-term memories had been burned out of him. It was standard procedure before cryostasis. There were hundreds of reports on memory removal in the file. The brain was a complex organ and memory was apparently as fragile as it was tenacious. Long-term memories were hard to remove. The reports in the file were deliberately vague on whether actual memory removal was ever achieved and not merely suppression. Pierce had interviewed the Russian doctors, and they had been frank about the impossibility of ever wholly getting rid of the memories of James Buchanan Barnes. 

He nodded. "2000. You missed some spectacular fireworks on New Year's Eve." He kept his tone casual as if this was a normal conversation, man to man. 

"I never thought I'd live that long," the soldier said quietly, adding "Sir" only after two beats, an obvious afterthought. 

Drewer radiated disapproval but Pierce let it slip. He did not plan to keep the soldier docile with drugs alone. There were other ways to make for loyal soldiers, but those had never been the Russians' strong suit. Time to start building rapport with the man.

"How old are you?" Pierce asked.

The soldier straightened; he clearly was taken aback by the personal inquiry. But he answered without hesitation. "If we're in May 2000 I am 56, Sir." He repeated the motion towards his body with the metal arm. "Don't look it, I know. It's because of the tank, Sir." 

It was a small movement, wholly unconscious, of that Pierce was certain. But he thought he'd seen the soldier incline his head ever so slightly towards the right, away from where the freezing chamber stood. Fear. Of being frozen. Of losing memories. Of losing months and years of his life. Yes, Pierce could work with that. 

"You do look younger than fifty," he said slowly and added, "I'm sixty-four," deliberately giving information that was accurate. He'd never actually lied about his age, and certainly not when he was trying to gain the man's trust. He started humming the old Beatles song under his breath, with Drewer shooting him a surprised look. The soldier listened, no emotion showing on his face but attention. With his enhanced hearing he had to pick up the melody pretty easily.

Pierce stopped humming. "You know it?"

"Of course." The soldier shrugged, an eerily balanced shrug that made the plates in the metal arm realign themselves with a barely audible whirr. "The Beatles. Bourgeois music from the West, polluting the glorious Soviet Union. Comrade Brezhnev was less than thrilled."

For a moment Pierce was taken aback by the frank recapitulation of outdated Soviet propaganda. Then he realised the man was having him on. His eyes never left the spot to Pierce's left but his lips twitched. It came as quickly as it went; Pierce was certain Drewer had not noticed. He nodded, letting the man know he understood. He had planned to give the soldier a minor mission. A nosy agent who had gotten too close to Hydra's secret. Poison, Pierce had thought, and who better to administer the tiny dart than the world's best sniper who reportedly could hit an ear lobe from 600 meters distance. But he hadn't expected this level of responsiveness. He hadn't expected, he realized now, someone with a mind still worth investigating. The Russians had done a better job than he'd given them credit for. He should have been prepared for the Red Room using more than brutal force to break this man. It made sense: if you could create a world-class assassin with just drugs, torture and memory wipes, the Winter Soldier would not be one of his kind. 

Pierce turned to Drewer. "Major, get him ready. Civilian clothing, small arms only. I want him at my place at 19:00. Just you and him. You can give the second security detail the evening off."

Drewer moved at once, and the soldier turned to follow his lead. He did not make eye-contact with Pierce nor give any indication that he'd noticed there was a change in plans. 

Pierce watched him, the muscular back, the controlled movements as the man walked with Drewer to the alcove designated as his sleeping quarters. He was under no illusion that the Winter Soldier could break his neck with minimal effort. But Alexander Pierce had not come to where he was today because he'd learned to live with fear. He knew how to control brute force, knew how to make men obey who were little more than animals. There wasn't much use today for the fist of Hydra. But a soldier as loyal and dependable, as _operational_ as a machine – he had uses for that in the 21st century.

*


End file.
